Axel Munthe, the unreleased album: «In the photos of my grandfather Maiuri and the tomb of Tutankhamun»

Unpublished and never shown encounters?
Certainly – anticipates Katriona Munthe – the one with his archaeologist friend Amedeo Maiuri: they met in a photographic studio in Naples and from there their partnership was born. It must be said that they did not agree on almost anything.

One cannot help but want to delve into it. What made them fight?
The interpretation of the finds that the grandfather had found digging in the garden of his villa San Michele, the “stuff of Tiberius” as the peasants said because the emperor had built his palace there. Professor Maiuri, as an archaeologist, began to question the findings of Axel, a Nordic steeped in D’Annunzio culture, with the scientificity, but perhaps also the cynicism, of a southern man of study. Their attendance became so close that his grandfather, in 1937, entrusted him with the excavation of Villa Damecuta, another of the properties he had purchased in Capri.

What induces an heir to make private pages public?
I take care of the family assets, unfortunately my father Malcolm also sold the Torre di Materita which had been his grandfather’s last home in Anacapri, a monastery with less light than Villa San Michele, which became unlivable for him after the detachment of the retina. In the many moves, including the one from the castle in Sweden where he died, I always brought all his things with me which eventually landed in the castle just outside Rome where we lived with my father who decided to stay in Italy. Today I live in Tuscany, but I grew up in Rome and we often came to the Croce house from there, having woven a very close friendship with all of them over the rescue of the philosopher.

Stories.
My father was an English spy and it was he who saved Benedetto Croce from an imminent kidnapping by the Germans who had understood that the influential anti-fascist could have an important role in Italian politics. One night, he took the scholar from Sorrento with some of his daughters and took him by boat to Capri; the following evening he returned to save his wife and other daughter as well. Since then the friendship between the Croces and the Munthes has never been interrupted. We are still very close today.

The exhibition is also an itinerary through the most important photographic studios of the time.
And which inevitably also became meeting places for intellectuals. The 24-year-old Munthe, who had just arrived in Naples in 1881, had his portrait taken by the De Luca Brothers who specialized in photographs of the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum and of the tourists on the Grand Tour. Then there were the shots with colleagues during his scientific training in Montpellier and in Paris. He was a pupil of Charcot, together with Freud, but never got along with him. In the French capital Prince Eugen, a great landscape architect, introduced him to the Swedish royal family for whom he offered his services as a physician. There are therefore photos of friends portrayed by the Court Atelier Lars Larsson together with those of Eugen’s sister-in-law, Victoria von Baden, future Queen of Sweden. The Prussian friendships are testified by the portraits made in the Ungmann photographic studio in Mlhausen.

The archive also returns the adventures.
Grandfather wanted to climb Matternorn and Montblanc with his dog and the souvenir photos show the frozen toes of a foot which were later amputated. He switched his Swedish nationality to English in order to participate as a medic on the front in the First World War. In preparation, there are various images of the future Queen Victoria von Baden. Munthe, having become his personal physician, travels more and more often with his patient in Europe. And it was she who sent her grandfather incognito to assist in the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb: she had in fact found an innovative solution to prevent mummies from perishing when they suddenly came into contact with the air.

Obviously there is a lot of Capri where Munthe, so to speak, studied attracting great personalities, given his reputation as a forerunner of behaviorist psychotherapy and holistic medicine.
He practiced hypnosis – concludes Katriona – even in war, with those wounded who suffered atrociously for lack of morphine. More than anything else, it was his desire to ease the pain of the hopeless that made him a great humanist.